Hannah left Islam for Christianity 15 years ago. The daughter of an imam, she has been on the run ever since, fleeing from the Quranic sentence of death for apostates and surviving only through police protection. But this isn’t the Middle East - this is the UK. Ruth Gledhill of The Times reports that Hannah has been forced to move 45 times since a gang armed with knives, axes and hammers attacked her home in 1994. The article also notes a Policy Exchange study that found that 36 per cent of British Muslims aged between 16 and 24 believed those who converted to another religion should be punished by death.

Fifty years ago, Christians represented 15 percent of the population in the West Bank and Gaza areas. Today, they are around 1.5 percent of the population–a number that is dropping rapidly. According to human rights lawyer Justus Reid Weiner, the ancient Christian communities in Palestinian-controlled areas will disappear entirelyin the next 15 years. Apparently the murders, firebombings, indiscriminate shootings, kidnappings targeting Christian leaders, and general religious harassment might be contributing to the exodus.

The trial of five men accused of torturing and murdering three Protestant missionaries earlier this year is underway in Turkey, the BBC reports. The three Christians–Tilmann Geske, Necati Aydin, and Ugur Yuksel–were tortured for three hours by a gang of up to 10 Muslim men in the offices of Zirve Bible Publishing in Malatya. The murderers video recorded the grisly murders on their cell phones. An open letter from the Protestant Church of Smyrna describes in graphic detail the horrific event.

The defendants claim they were provoked by the victims because their activities were “undermining Islam.” Several media outlets, including the Turkish Daily News, note that prosecutors in the case intend to put the victims themselves on trial, with a majority of the case files dedicated to their ministry work. These case files also identify the work of other Christian workers in the area. That same paper reported immediately after the murders that one high-ranking Justice Ministry official declared, “Missionary work is even more dangerous than terrorism and unfortunately is not considered a crime in Turkey.”

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The All India Catholic Union released a report last week documenting 190 cases of religiously-directed attacks and cases of persecution by Hindus against Christians, according to Asia News, which includes murders, armed assaults, sexual assaults and even lynchings. Another organization, the Global Council of Indian Christians, has documented 464 cases of violent attacks against Christians in the past 20 months.

The state of Karnataka is perhaps the worst in India for this religiously-directed violence, which can only expect to become worse as the Hindu extremist Baratiya Janata Party (BJP) took over administration of the region earlier this month, which looks the other way at anti-Christian activity, if not outright endorses it. The BJP has also sought to force a ban on religious conversions and a repeal of India’s secular constitution, while also engaging in virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric.

ADNKronos reports that yesterday 30 Islamic “vigiliantes” stormed an Indonesian house church in West Java in order to prevent any further worship. The article notes that Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, has a law requiring non-Muslims to obtain the consent of 60 members of the community from another faith before they are allowed to build any religious facility. There are no such requirements for Islamic places of worship.

Christian/Muslim conflict is the regular feature of life there (almost always to the detriment of the Christian community), such as ongoing terrorist campaign in Sulawesi and Poso to establish a Taliban-style Islamic state. Two years ago three Christian girls were beheaded and another severely injured on their way to school by Muslim “vigilantes”, who later admitted they collected the heads of the girls as Ramadan trophies. One of the men convicted earlier this year in the attack who was associated with the Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist organization told the court, “It’s not a problem (if I am being sentenced to prison) because this is a part of our struggle.”

Apparently taking advantage of the political crisis from Pakistan President Musharraf’s suspension of the constitution, several Islamist parties have decided to use the occasion to attack Christians. According to one report, in the village of Govind mosque loudspeakers are being used to instruct the mobs: “A religious war has been started against the kaffirs [infidels] so all the Muslims come out of their houses”. One villager said: “Muslims threatened us that when they will [be] released from the jail, they will annihilate all of our houses and kill us. They are very powerful people.”

Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, tens of thousands of Christians from the Assyrian, Chaldean, Syriac and Evangelical Christian communities (many of which predate Islam) have been forced to flee their ancient homeland. These communities and their churches have been targets of repeated bombings, kidnappings, murders and threats of violence from foreign terrorists and Iraqi insurgents and militia.

But an image captured by intrepid milblogger Michael Yon, who has done some of the best outside-the-Green Zone reporting during the war, gives evidence of a glimmer of hope for Christians and Muslims alike in Iraq.

Yon reports: “I photographed men and women, both Christians and Muslims, placing a cross atop the St. John’s Church in Baghdad. They had taken the cross from storage and a man washed it before carrying it up to the dome.”

His post bears an appropriate title: Thanks and Praise.